Velikovsky, Immanuel. Worlds in Collision (1950).

Immanuel Velikovksy, in this book, presents what could be looked at as a revisionist meteorological history of the Earth. He attempts to tie together a mass of historic documents to prove that early on in Man’s history the earth was involved with two close encounters with a comet. The scienetific community immediately rejected Velikovsky theory and his methodology in going about proving it. I must say though that Velikovsky was on to something, though I’m not sure what. He uses folklore and religious records as his evidence. I was recently on an airplane where they showed a Sixty Minutes clip that showed how people that live literally on the water in Southeast Asia avoided the tsunami due to their folklore having passed down the legend of its coming. There folklore held in it evidence of a past catastrophie. This adds some weight to Velikovsky’s idea that we can find out a great deal about the Earth’s history through the history of its ancient peoples.

Anyway, there is not much law going on in the volume, but there are a few snippets. Probably the biggest idea is how this sort of knowledge is contained in laws. He builds his argument around Biblical references. He focuses a great deal on Moses at Mount Sinai, which he refers to as the “mount of lawgiving.” He gives a brief description of what sorts of astronomical and geological forces were occurring while Moses was on the Mount of Lawgiving. He cites a Hebrew text wherein it is said that “all nations” heard the law being given, which he claims was the sound that results from a heavenly body passing so close to the Earth. These noises he claims gave us the Decalogue. He cites a Chinese Emperor who was renamed Yahou (comare to Yaweh) around the same time and was a great King-lawgiver.

He gives an astronomical explanation for the Hebrew law that declared every seventh year a sabbatical year. This law also said that the 50th year was a jubilee year in which land lay fallow but was also returned to its original proprieters (one could not convey his land forever according to the law). It is, he claims based on the frequency that the comet that collided with earth continued to pass.

We learn that all this commotion in the stars caused the earths time systems to get off course. This was first attempted to be corrected by the Canopus Decree, which reset the calendar by law. Law often resets calendars in history. Later Velikovsky points out Roman laws that reset the calendar.

Because this phenomena appeared to be stellar bull or cow, he tells us that the reason cows are sacred and are forbidden to be killed by religious laws in India.

Finally, we learn that Quetzal-cohuatl was the lawgiver to the Toltecs.